A Novel Marketing Idea

Woohoo! When I got to work this morning, my coworker handed me *$60 in cash and a $15 check. Why? He sold five copies of My Lost Summer. He teaches English at a local community college, and he offered his two classes (45 students total) extra credit if they’d read my book and write their responses. They don’t know he knows me. He wants to save it as a surprise and then bring me in the last day of classes to talk about the book, answer their questions.

He sold three copies last week and thinks two more students will order on Wednesday. When he told me he was going to do this, I figured on 20% of the class going for extra credit, and I’m right on.

He said he’d keep making the offer each semester he taught. I say, “All right!”

Thanks, Cris.

*The retail price for My Lost Summer is $16.95. I sell copies from my own stash for $15.

Mark Slays Me Again

The President’s State of the Union address was on TV last night. At 9 o’clock I was lying on the couch reading, and Mark was flipping through the channels. I came to the end of a chapter and said, “Let’s hear what the President has to say.”

We have DirectTV, which has a program menu that shows how much time a show is scheduled for. When Mark changed channels, I saw that stations had scheduled the address for two hours.

“Two hours! He’s gonna talk for two hours?”

Mark reminded me, “This is the one where everybody applauds all the time,” meaning the President might only have 30 minutes of worthwhile monologue, yet the politicians in attendance would intersperse his speech with an hour and a half of clapping.

(I read this morning that the President spoke for 49 minutes [including applause, I assume]. The rest of the scheduled two hours was for the news folks to analyze the speech.)

So Mark clicked on a station that was showing the address, and Bush was talking about education, saying how public schools, even in the poorer areas, should be equivalent with each other. That garnered applause. We must have tuned in too late to hear his plan to ensure that this happens.

“And the nation’s health care,” Bush said, and the gallery busted with applause at the promise of good news the fresh topic would bring. “Something has to be done about that.” Vice President Cheney, sitting behind the President’s right shoulder, clapped his hands fervently. We heard hoots and hollers, and when the camera panned the gallery, we saw a few men in suits doing fist pumps. They were really into this.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, D-California, seated next to Cheney, rolled her eyes as she recognized the empty rhetoric.

The President continued, fueled by the crowd’s enthusiasm, “That’s right,” he said, slamming his right fist to the podium, “something has to be done!”

Members of the House and the Senate, all in attendance, all went wild. People stood, clapping and shouting like they’d just heard the Stones perform their classic “Satisfaction.” Even Representative Pelosi, however hesitant, stood and clapped—though she didn’t smile. This went on for 20 seconds.

(That’s not exactly what happened, but that’s the summary.)

The whole clapping after every statement the President made was very annoying. I said so out loud, “All that clapping is annoying,” and I asked Mark to change channels. Pointing the remote at the TV and perusing the menu, Mark said, “The State of the Union address is really just a pep rally." After he'd settled on American Chopper, he added, "A pep rally for a team that sucks.”

Now, how funny is that? Read it again if you don’t think it’s funny—because you missed something.

It is funny because that's exactly what it's like. I think we need a new coach.

Gettin' His Kicks at 86

My Lost Summer is dedicated to my Grandma Ann, who, during my recovery, kept the journal on which the book is based. She died unexpectedly in 2001 just as I had started writing what ended up being Chapters 10 through 13—an essay for grad school. I was going to surprise her with the finished essay, but she never even knew I was working on it.

She and Grandpa Mike had been married 61 years when she died, and of course, they were best friends, traveling often, golfing and bowling in leagues, lunching with friends and generally staying active.

Grandpa’s 88 now (86 just made the title flow easier), and he still bowls. He golfs when he can though a couple years ago he developed asthma, which lays him up some hot Ohio summer days that confine him to the house.

Naturally, since he doesn’t travel or socialize so much in the evenings any more, he watches more television. Mark and I usually visit on a Saturday or Sunday, and sports programs play while we talk. One time, a commercial for the sitcom ‘Two and a Half Men’ came on, and Grandpa asked us if we’d ever seen it.

“We’ve seen it a few times,” Mark answered.

“I watch it all the time,” said Grandpa smiling. “Some of those things they talk about...” Here Grandpa widened his eyes, “Hooh, boy. And that little boy, he doesn’t understand none of it.” Grandpa chuckled.

Mark and I watch it regularly now. The topic is always sex, the details of which are hinted at by the characters. What gives the show its appeal is the young boy missing the innuendos or understanding them too literally.

Last night’s program was especially risqué, and after one laugh Mark said, “I can’t believe your grandpa watches this.”

That made me laugh even harder, thinking of my 88-year-old grandpa laughing at the same raunchy banter. I’m glad he still gets his kicks.

No Baby on the Way - Yet

When I got up Saturday morning, I discovered I wasn't pregnant--after a measly 25-day cycle. What's up with that? Last month it was short too. Oh, wait....No. Um....I don't know. It probably has something to do with the whole time thing. New Zealand is 18 hours--almost one full day--ahead of Ohio. That likely messed things up, which is why last month seemed so early and this month seems off.

Anyway, I'm seeing a specialist February 9. I do feel loyalty to the doctor I'm seeing now as he's been my gyn. since 1999. But, I'm not pregnant yet, and he doesn't specialize in that, and I'm 37--each month counts. So I'm switching to a doctor recommended by a friend of mine from high school. My friend saw this doctor and now has a little girl about one year old. Success!

a January 23 addendum to this post--

Yesterday my doctor called, the one to whom I feel loyal. He said that my estrogen level was 3.6 (unknown [to me] units). That means I didn't ovulate even though I was taking 50 mg Chlomid in order to do so. He said it needs to be at least 8 to 10 to indicate that I've ovulated, and when this whole thing started and my first estrogen level was measured at 1.8, he said a level of 10 to 14 is normal. I have a long way to go. So the doctor called in a two-month prescription for me of 100-mg Chlomid. That's only 10 pills because I only take five a month.

I asked him if he'd heard of the doctor I was planning on seeing. Yes. He said she is a fertility specialist and nothing she will provide is covered by insurance. (The Chlomid is not covered by insurance either, but my appointments are.) He said that he'll send me to a specialist once his options have run out. I'm hoping these 100-mg Chlomid send a couple eggs to the hatchery and I have twins and get it all over with, that's what I'm hoping. Mark is too.

a Hodge Podge of Topics

1. Mark got in from work this morning just as I was putting on my shoes to walk out the door. We did a quick lip peck, and as I backed away to put on my jacket, he said to me, "Your hair looks good." I toyed with ending that sentence with an exclamation point, but Mark rarely gets excited about anything, but he was part-way excited about my hair. He said, "Your hair looks good," as if he meant, "Your hair is starting to look good," meaning it's looked less than good for so long now, he's come to expect sub-par hair as the norm.

I thanked him. Not until I was in the car on the way to work did I have time to think about what may lurk behind his compliment. Just kidding. I'm not one of those women. If he gives me a compliment, I'll take it as such. And I have to agree that my hair is looking better. Since November, I've had it cut twice by a new woman. It costs 50 bucks a cut, but now I have a potential Va-Va-Voom do rather than $20 ho-hum hair. I'm just starting to learn how to fix it. The key is high heat on the blow dryer. I hate using high heat though.

2. You know Mark and I are trying to get pregnant, right? Well, this month is my first month on Chlomid, a pill that's to make me ovulate. I was ovulating before, but the doctor told me they weren't quality ovulations (?) I'm supposed to give blood on day 21 of my cycle. I just read that as I was putting on my shoes this morning sitting in front of the refrigerator, where I posted this information before our trip to New Zealand last month, as Mark walked through the door. So I called the office this morning; a nurse asked the doctor if giving blood today, day 23 of my cycle, would be too late, and the doctor said today would be fine to give blood. So I'm leaving work at 2:30 to do that.

3. Today I checked out the My Lost Summer page on Lulu.com, my printer. It turns out the preview of my book that was posted is gone. How long it's been gone, I do not know. So I spent hours today figuring out what would be best to post as a preview, what would hook people in to purchasing my book. (You don't have to order online and pay shipping; most Waldenbooks Stores across the U.S. have copies. And you can order it from any bookstore.) I just completed the new preview. Please go to http://www.lulu.com/content/173173 and select the "Preview this book" link under the cover image.

The first preview, the one that is gone, was the first five chapters. I think they're the most exciting of the book. However, others find the book really gets interesting from Chapter 10 on, so I included excerpts from later chapters in the new preview.

I like Chapters 1-5 because I was unconscious for most of that time. The chapters describe my family's reactions to the news of my injury, the dynamic of my divorced parents, their routines now that I was in the hospital long-term with an unknown outcome. It's all new to me, which is why I find it so interesting.

Chapters 10 through the end of the book is based on my memories of recovery. I've lived with those memories for more than 20 years now, so they're old news to me. But most readers likely feel as both judges for the Writer's Digest self-published book awards felt:

"Chapters 10 on are just amazing. Seeing the frustrations and hearing the speech during recovery and in school was heart-breaking and triumphant. For me, this is where the story really began."

"I feel like the book really comes alive when you begin to write from your own perspective in Chapter 10. Reading about the world trough the eyes of someone with severe brain damage is fascinating."

Another Leak at Grandpa's

Sunday Mark and I visited my Grandpa Mike. He’s a main player in my book. The closet door was open and the closet was empty and stuff was about. Mark asked, “Is your roof leaking again?”

Even though Grandpa had a new roof put on this past summer, it was leaking again. He had taken everything out of the closet so that it wouldn’t be damaged. There were old newspaper clippings and whole sections even that Grandma Ann had saved for some reason or other. The front of one section from 1984 showed my brothers and me as we road in the Franklin Fourth of July parade.
For those of you who haven’t yet read My Lost Summer, I’ll fill you in: my coma was the result of a horseback riding accident while I was riding my horse from Carlisle, a village where I grew up, to Franklin, the next town over, to be in the Fourth of July parade. The year was 1983, and I was 13. I didn’t make it to the parade.

Small towns being small, of course by the end of the summer, everyone knew what had happened since the local papers carried updates regularly.

In 1984 the parade committee asked me to be the Grand Marshall because of what had happened the year before. I was truly honored to have been asked. I felt like the belle of the ball until the driver put the top of the convertible up because of rain.

In this picture, the one from the Chronicle salvaged from Grandpa’s closet, my body language indicates that I’m breathing in the last bit of celebrity. I remember a photographer shouting my name from the sidewalk just before this shot was taken. I gave him a big, $10 smile, knowing the picture was for the paper because of the fancy camera, and I rode the rest of the parade route in the relative shelter of the convertible, satisfied with my showing, however regretful that the rain hadn’t held off longer.

Another Judge's Viewpoint

Several entries back I shared with you one judge’s opinion of my memoir, My Lost Summer. Yesterday I got in the mail the other judge’s thoughts on the book. They are a bit more positive.

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “poor” and 5 meaning “excellent,” please evaluate the following:

Structure and organization: 3

Grammar: 5

Cover design: 5

Judge’s commentary:

1. What did you like best about this book?
The cover is just gorgeous! Is that Flash? [Yes. Flash is the horse who tripped, dropping me, resulting in a coma.] The blues and golden brown of the scenes are calming and I really like the title too. The pace and detail fo Libbi’s time in the hospital work will – I feel I get a clear picture of what is going on. The journal entries from the mother [actually, my grandmother kept the journal] are also helpful by making the story more real and inclusive to the reader. Allowing the reader to enter inside the mental state of a patient recovering from a coma is a great feat. I even wish the author would have been less cautious with pointing out what were probably accurate perceptions/memories and not. I wouldn’t have minded a mixing of the two. (Perhaps show an outside perspective with the family journals?) [While I wrote this memoir, the whole fiasco was playing out of James Frey fabricating details in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. I didn’t want to have to go through the same thing.] Chapters 10 on are just amazing. Seeing the frustrations and hearing the speech during recovery and in school was heart-breaking and triumphant. For me, this is where the story really began.

2. How can the author improve this book?
1. What happens in chapter one might be placed between chapter 2 and 3, where it occurs chromologically. And since chapter one is a part of the same event as two and three, you might just combine these three and call it chapter one. Larger and fewer chapters are helpful in that they eliminate some transitory signs that are not needed. 2. You might try playing around with the possibilities of chapter titles throughout. Don’t worry about being less direct about what the chapter contains in these titles. Your first sentences [of the chapters] do a really good job of grounding the reader. [3.] Chapter four is interesting since it touches on the few memories of innocence before the fall as well as the gaps in those memories. Since so much of Part I is in third person with chapter four being from Libbi’s viewpoint, this chapter might be expanded quite a bit for balance. This also might make the switch in tense more purposeful.

Read the other judge's review here.

An Entertaining Blog Right Here on Blogger

I just started reading a "reality" blog called Today On the Production Floor (http://todayontheproductionfloor.blogspot.com/). It’s like a blue-collar The Office (NBC, Thursday nights). The blog author is a production manager who smartly hasn’t identified the company she works for nor the area of the country she’s in–though she has given clues as she and her co-workers use the word "pop" for soft drink, which likely puts her in the Midwest somewhere, and wherever she is, a significant amount of snow has fallen already this season.

Location doesn’t matter anyway because, according to this author, the dynamics among the characters of production plants are the same everywhere. She identifies the players with affectionate names like Crazy Office Supply Jody, The New Guy, TheBearded Woman, GQ for a gay production-floor worker, and several others. She describes their antics with such detail, from Hedda working the system to get all that's rightfully hers to Mr. Brownstar asking the see her urethra (!) when he meant to say uvula, sometimes I wonder if the author herself is inventing the tales. To be honest, I doubt any fabrication because she includes the mundane ("the ever twisting audits and surveillance for our FDA / ISO re certifications") with the mania. But I don’ t care either way because it’s so entertaining. The best part may be the author’s editorial remarks concerning her employer’s and coworkers' apparent social ineptitude.

To get the most from that blog, you should read from the first entry in October so that you become familiar with the characters. Then enjoy the daily entries from the manager On the Production Floor.

Passing on the Wrong Side

Drivers in New Zealand ride on the left. When Mark and I would walk across a street at an intersection, we looked left and right and up and back and left and right again before venturing out in the street, unfamiliar which way traffic was approaching. After 10 days or so in the country we got used to it and on trails took the customary left side when meeting other hikers heading in the opposite direction. When we’d meet someone head-on while we were walking on the left and the other party on their right, we figured they were Americans not yet used to the left lane travel.

I just made a trip to the cafeteria here at work to return my lunch tray, and I find that I am meeting co-workers head on as I’ve grown accustomed to walking on the left. How easily our habits change. I’ll be back to the “right” way of doing things before long.

So Much Speculation

Four people besides me know my take-home pay: my husband, my boss, the HR guy with whom I negotiated my salary, and the company president. I make SIGNIFICANTLY less than the national average of someone with my background and experience. (To be fair, Ohio has one of the lowest costs of living in the country, but still, I’d like to make what I’m worth.)

Then I wonder how, when people learn that I am going on “another” vacation, they can comment, even jokingly, “You make too much,” or “You must have a nice job,” annunciating "nice job" and raising their eyebrows like I sell drugs or something.

If you’ve read my blog from the beginning, you might have noticed that my husband and I traveled to Puerto Rico, Georgia—to visit Dad—Oregon, and New Zealand in the past year.

Yes, traveling takes money, sometimes lots of money, but I’ve worked the last 15 years (minus grad school and temporary ‘between jobs’ stints) and have managed to save, manage, and grow that money, plus Mark has a salary too. And we don't have children.

People act like these trips we take are presents, vacations won on a game show. Give us some credit. They are labored-for, planned, and earned. We don't stay in luxury suites when we travel. In fact, we slept in beds only four of 19 nights in New Zealand. We shivered in sleeping bags in tents the rest of the time.

Yesterday I told Mark that I’ll strongly suggest to the next person who speculates my pay, “Perhaps, over the years, I just managed my money well.” He told me simply to tell people I married up. He is so funny.

One Judge's Take on My Lost Summer

Mark and I got back the evening of Thursday, January 4 from our three weeks in New Zealand. We had only three voice mails waiting for our attention, and the first one was from a woman who read an article in the local paper about My Lost Summer. Nice (though I’m not real happy about people calling my home about the book).
In our three-weeks of back mail, among the Christmas cards and bills, from Writer’s Digest I received a certificate of participation for submitting my book to the publication’s Self Published book contest. I put the certificate in the pile of papers to be recycled because, really, at about the end of junior high school, I stopped keeping a scrapbook in which to file the minutiae of my accomplishments. The piece of mail from WD was not pointless, however, because also with the certificate were the judge’s comments on the book.

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “poor” and 5 meaning “excellent,” please evaluate the following:

Structure and organization: 3

Grammar: 3
Misspellings and some awkward phrasing.

Cover design: 5
Very arresting image.

Judge’s commentary:
1. What did you like best about this book?
I feel like the book really comes alive when you begin to write from your own perspective in Chapter 10. Reading about the world through the eyes of someone with severe brain damage is fascinating.

2. How can the author improve this book?
Be aware of tense shift in back cover description.

That’s it. Those are one person’s thoughts on My Lost Summer—though I must say nearly everyone has told me the cover is awesome. Thanks, Kathy, my graphic designer.

On Saturday I got an e-mail from a man in Illinois who read my book. This is how the message started: “I just finished your book "My Lost Summer, and I enjoyed it, and learned from it.”

I’ll resist the urge to explain my typos and defend my organization and just take the bad with the good.